Rover picking up hacker-maker creations

Updated 7:05 pm, Friday, October 26, 2012

Upholsterer and furniture maker Michele Marti takes two chairs, merges them, strips it down and creates one sexy piece of Victorian furniture.

Upholsterer and furniture maker Michele Marti takes two chairs, merges them, strips it down and creates one sexy piece of Victorian furniture.

Photo: Michele Marti

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Upholsterer and furniture maker Michele Marti takes two chairs, merges them, strips it down and creates one sexy piece of Victorian furniture.

Upholsterer and furniture maker Michele Marti takes two chairs, merges them, strips it down and creates one sexy piece of Victorian furniture.

Photo: Michele Marti

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Upholsterer and furniture maker Michele Marti takes two chairs, merges them, strips it down and creates one sexy piece of Victorian furniture.

Upholsterer and furniture maker Michele Marti takes two chairs, merges them, strips it down and creates one sexy piece of Victorian furniture.

Photo: Michele Marti

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Upholsterer and furniture maker Michele Marti takes two chairs, merges them, strips it down and creates one sexy piece of Victorian furniture.

Upholsterer and furniture maker Michele Marti takes two chairs, merges them, strips it down and creates one sexy piece of Victorian furniture.

Photo: Michele Marti

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Michele Marti

Michele Marti

Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

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Michele Marti takes a saw to a Victorian chair before rebuilding it with a corset.

Michele Marti takes a saw to a Victorian chair before rebuilding it with a corset.

Photo: Michele Marti

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Michele Marti melds three chairs into a sofa.

Michele Marti melds three chairs into a sofa.

Photo: Michele Marti

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Annabel Dudash (left) and Elsa Rudolph Swanson give discarded toys new life and now sell them at Oakland's monthly Art Murmur festival.

Annabel Dudash (left) and Elsa Rudolph Swanson give discarded toys new life and now sell them at Oakland's monthly Art Murmur festival.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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Annabel Dudash and Elsa Rudolph Swanson give discarded toys new life and now sell them at Oakland's monthly Art Murmur festival.

Annabel Dudash and Elsa Rudolph Swanson give discarded toys new life and now sell them at Oakland's monthly Art Murmur festival.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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Annabel Dudash and Elsa Rudolph Swanson give discarded toys new life and now sell them at Oakland's monthly Art Murmur festival.

Annabel Dudash and Elsa Rudolph Swanson give discarded toys new life and now sell them at Oakland's monthly Art Murmur festival.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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Annabel Dudash (left) and Elsa Rudolph Swanson will lead toy customization workshops next year at the Oakland Museum.

Annabel Dudash (left) and Elsa Rudolph Swanson will lead toy customization workshops next year at the Oakland Museum.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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Annabel Dudash and Elsa Rudolph Swanson give discarded toys new life and now sell them at Oakland's monthly Art Murmur festival.

Annabel Dudash and Elsa Rudolph Swanson give discarded toys new life and now sell them at Oakland's monthly Art Murmur festival.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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The Oakland Rover

The Oakland Rover

Photo: Sean Olson

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Rover picking up hacker-maker creations

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When Michele Marti rebuilt two Victorian chairs as one, it wasn't just about furniture.

"I was single for so long, I started to notice the gestures of love," says Marti, a 26-year-old upholsterer and designer who lives in Oakland.

She found a large, boxy chair at the Alameda flea market and used a small Japanese hand saw to remove its right arm and part of its base - she then tucked a smaller ornate, rounded chair against it, built their base together and reattached the larger chair's arm to wrap around her. She called it the Lovers.

Customization - the art of adjusting objects to fit individual needs - is hardly new, but never has the movement been so coherently Californian. The combination of two Bay Area tropes, the hacker and the maker, California customization is becoming its own aesthetic. The hacker, a concept popularized by Silicon Valley programmer culture, is someone who fiddles with, breaks or fixes existing systems. The maker, which comes from Burning Man's steampunk aesthetic, combines technology with manual skills, mixing robotics and 3-D printers with woodworking and metallurgy.

Collecting artifacts

Now, with a major new show, "We/customize," the Oakland Museum of California is canonizing the state's customization culture - which is hacking everything from trucks and toys to custom artificial limbs and Ikea furniture. This month through December, a small custom vehicle, called the Oakland Rover, will be collecting these hacked objects from around the state. In February, the museum will show the artifacts along with a series of workshops and tutorials. Meanwhile, professors at California College of the Arts (CCA) have started teaching a course on customization and are working to put a movement as diverse as its participants into a syllabus.

"The normal hobbyist garage shop today is incredibly sophisticated and connected," says CCA customization teacher Barbara Holmes, who's a fine art furniture hacker outside of class. "You have tutorials on YouTube and can have a question answered online within minutes. The barrier for entry is lower. We're able to do a lot more and a lot quicker."

"There's a historically rebellious, anarchist spirit in the Bay Area, and that's the spirit of customization," says Holmes. "To my knowledge, there's no other university in the world with a class on customization."

To Holmes, customization is about reclaiming the objects in our lives and "instilling curiosity and awareness about our global culture."

"We're seeing a time where there's a melding and broadening of genres," she says. "The modernist hierarchy has been leveled down, and everyone's mixing in things. I see this especially happening with interiors and furniture."

"We're defining what the style is," she continues. "For now, all we can say is it's beyond the term eclectic."

Taking the oath

In her Thursday morning class, organized to work with the Oakland Museum show, Holmes hands out white lab coats to her students and asks them to raise their right hands for an oath:

"With this lab coat I vow to be intensely curious, to embrace risk, to work tirelessly to customize and modify to my personal needs and inclinations."

One student, Noah Hillis, 20, checks the time on a curious-looking iPhone. He's swapped out the glass back with a neon orange plate.

Weeks before the Rover's launch, designers Martin Sprouse and Dan Rosenfeld are at Bart Manufacturing in San Jose putting finishing touches on the Rover, a small electric vehicle that will travel the state collecting customized objects to bring back to the museum for the show. Visiting customization fairs, art festivals, and artist studios, the Rover will make a series of voyages to collect objects and provide workshops along the way.

"It's not a food truck or a golf cart or even a car," says Sprouse, who designed the vehicle to be thin enough to drive throughout the museum or into school auditoriums. "We didn't want it to look like a car in architecture. We wanted it to look like architecture."

The vehicle is a small truck painted neon green (see graphic). Where the truck bed would be is a glowing cube made of translucent resin slabs. The panels lift like gull-wing doors revealing large sliding boxes, called cartridges, which will hold the artifacts as they travel back to the museum.

Inspired by Burning Man's mutant vehicles and Los Angeles' custom car movement, the vehicle is made to look like a jewel box. "Light blasts out, and you never know what's inside."

In Temescal, two of the Oakland Rover's biggest inspirations are busy with hot glue guns.

Elsa Rudolph Swanson and Annabel Dudash, both 11, have spent much of the past two years breaking and rebuilding toys. Elsa holds up one of her creations - Dora the Explorer body, Daffy Duck, spikes from a dragon down its back.

Originally handing out the creations at birthday parties, the girls have set up a booth on Telegraph at 23rd and have begun selling at the monthly Art Murmur festival. The girls' teachers, regulars at the first-Friday event, stop by their booth each week.

"It's incredible. They'll make 50 units at a time. And sell out," says Elsa's father, the painter Bill Swanson. "They're paying for their own website."

"It's fun because we're not making the mutants out of gold or something, we're just making them out of old toys," says Annabel. "It's really fun when a new movie comes out, especially if we don't like it because then McDonald's has the toys and so many people throw them away."

Elsa and Annabel will be leading toy customization workshops at the museum early next year.

They go outside and try to hammer a mummy out of its shell. It doesn't crack.

"Girls, what about your saw?" Swanson says.

"Aha! Success!" shouts his daughter.

A few blocks away, Marti uses an upholstery staple gun and reams of velvet on her flea market Victorian furniture at home in Oakland's Longfellow neighborhood.

Marti makes composite pieces, merging several antiques, upholstering two or three chairs together.

"It's built so if two people sit, your knees will touch," she says. "It's the art of flirtation."

When she was an art student at CCA, she would walk down Folsom Street and began noticing the playfully sexual furniture.

"Most of that stuff is pretty hideous, but it got me thinking about furniture that flirts," she says. "Furniture that has San Francisco's Victorian charm and a wink."

After putting a cabriole-legged side table through an enormous saw, she reglued it with a hinge so it splits and opens from the front.

She took a traditional Victorian moulded chair, hand-sawed it in half, and rebuilt it around a corset.

"I didn't want to mess with the original finish of it because I wanted to show the wear and tear, the history."

Marti has been shown at Design Week and Bay Area Now, as well as featured in Architectural Digest - and she just sold her first piece for nearly $5,000.

"By customizing, the piece speaks what I was feeling," says Marti. "And who wouldn't want their furniture to do that?"

Rover special features

"It's like the lunar rover, collecting samples but leaving stuff too, so it has to serve both functions of carrying and entertaining," says designer Martin Sprouse. "It's bringing the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) to everyone and bringing everyone back to the museum. Building this was a big responsibility."

Movie screen: "A 5-by-8-foot movie screen is built into the rover so it can be its own media center. The screen is a giant folding billboard with a projector at the bottom. It can go low for a bunch of kids to sit up close or raise up for a big Lake Merritt event."

Doors: "We made the gullwing doors to look like the awning of revamped OMCA."

Cartridges: "There are three cartridges, or sliding drawers. Each one is an empty room that can get curated."

Folding table: "A 6-foot-long picnic table folds out of the truck."

T-slots: "An infinite number of different things can hook onto it. Everything has a T-slot on the frame and inside, so when the doors open, there are a million attachment points.

Glow: "When it's driving, we wanted it to look otherworldly. The inside glows green through the translucent walls."

Color: "We wanted it to match OMCA's color scheme, so its colors, that bright neon green, matches a mural on the building. It helps show that the rover is actually an extension of the architecture."

Plugs: "The rover can run 10 glue guns at a time."

Follow the Rover

What do you customize? To share your work, follow the team at wecustomize. org and upload your photos at wecustomize.org/submit.